Page 148 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
ning not just of social competition but also of its usual concomitant: bragging. (This was a time at which some boys would start carrying a condom in their wallet for so long that it would form a circular dent, in which it would sit, creasing the leather but never coming out for air.) There was far more talk than action, but the words that were used were inevitably instructive.
It went without saying—so I’ll say it—that I loved the athletic pro- gram and received memorable instruction at Starlight, but I’d rather mention a few other experiences at the camp that made a significant impression then—or in retrospect:
• On my first day at Camp Starlight, I wrote a letter to my parents in which I said, among other innocuous things, that, unlike the way in which the campus worked at Anawana, at Starlight the senior bunks were located on the edge of the woods (which I thought was an interesting and positive fact). The day that my parents got the letter, my mother called the camp because she was worried and had decided that I was unhappy.
• My counselor in Bunk 13 was on his way to law school after that summer. He was a reader, most memorably of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, which he permitted me to borrow. I was impressed that he had decided to become an attorney. I was also impressed that he was reading The Idiot. Most of all, in retrospect, I am impressed by the conjunction of those facts.
• My counselor in Bunk 16 was also a law student. More than forty years later, when I was a practicing attorney, we would be opposed to each other in a real estate–related transaction. I liked him as a counselor in each of his capacities. When he had been the Bunk 16 counselor the year before, he had as one of his campers a pretty good basketball player named Howie, who became a partner of mine in our law firm. I liked Howie when he was a camper.
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